


we'll watch the sky explode tonight

by defcontwo



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:53:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/pseuds/defcontwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She half expected him to try and talk her out of it but he just wraps an arm around her and kisses her on the forehead and says, "Don't forget to send me a postcard, Hawkeye."</p>
            </blockquote>





	we'll watch the sky explode tonight

**Author's Note:**

> written for a friend off of the prompt: Kate Bishop/Clint Barton, Been so long since I seen your face, or felt a part of this human race. I've been living out of this here suitcase for way too long.

Kate runs away to L.A. for a lot of reasons. She tells her father, silent and heavy with disappointment over the phone, that she wants to learn independence. 

She tells her sister that she's always wanted to see the California beaches. 

She tells her team that the East Coast has to stop hogging all the good heroes. 

All of these reasons are lies, in their own way. 

She tells Clint, knees drawn up to her chest as she perches on his worn-out couch with Lucky leaning against her, that she has always dreamed of just getting in a car and going far far away. It's something she hates to admit, even to herself - she feels married to her own sense of responsibility. 

Picking up stakes and going where the wind takes her is the sort of thing that people do when they don't have charities to manage and soup kitchen shifts and patrol schedules. 

She tells Clint and he nods and gives her that look, the serious one that lets her know that he gets it. 

She half expected him to try and talk her out of it but he just wraps an arm around her and kisses her on the forehead and says, "Don't forget to send me a postcard, Hawkeye."

"You got it, Hawkeye," she says, closing her eyes and breathing in the smell of aftershave and the cleaner that they both uses on their arrows, and tells herself to commit this moment to memory. 

She doesn't know when she'll have another one like it. 

\+ 

Kate stays in L.A. for a year but no matter how hard she tries, she never does manage to learn her way around. 

She was right when she told her team that L.A. could use a few good heroes - the crime rate is high and the capacity to meet it is low. Kate finds herself working harder than she ever has before, running on fumes and coffee and determination. 

She leaps from rooftop to rooftop, stays out all night until the sun comes up with her bow at her back, and feels like whatever it is she's looking for, she's not going to find it here. 

This city needs her and she could stay forever if she let herself, she knows, for all that she never feels quite settled there. 

She tries to write to Clint about a million times and never knows what to say. She thinks, I miss you. She thinks, the sunset is beautiful the way it comes up over the city. She thinks, you'd get a real kick out of my shitty apartment. 

The words never come out right and so she keeps putting it off. 

In the end, the summer is too long and the winter too mild, and she gets the itch again that tells her to move on. She'll miss the taco stand down the street from her apartment and Maria, the woman who helps run the local Planned Parenthood, where Kate drops by to help out every once in a while. 

Kate shoves a book of maps onto her desk and flips through them until she finds what she's looking for. 

She sells her car to Maria for half the price and hops a plane to Berlin the next day. 

She stuffs a postcard, the Los Angeles skyline on one side and her own neat handwriting on the other, into the mailbox before heading to the airport. 

It is the first and last postcard that she will send to Clint from L.A. 

\+ 

Berlin reminds Kate of New York, in the way that all places remind her of home a little bit, even if the resemblance only works when she turns her head and squints a little. 

It is chaotic and grey and there's more to do than she can wrap her head around. She took German in high school but her grammar is rusty and she never did get the hang of deklination, so she enrolls in a few classes. 

She takes every train in all directions and walks everywhere until she knows the city well enough to work up a patrol schedule. 

Her first weekend, she takes the train to Warschauer Strasse and dances until seven in the morning. She winds up going home with a tall German boy named Max with messy blond hair that's not quite the right shade, but with her legs wrapped around his waist as he fucks her so hard the headboard rattles, it doesn't really matter that much. 

Kate awakens with bruises on her hips - she thinks about sneaking out but is glad she stayed when Max smirks in a way that is more charming than annoying before going down on her, wringing noises out of her with every practiced swipe of his tongue that Kate didn't know she was capable of. 

She spends the next month in and out of his bed before moving on. She needed this breath of fresh air, this time to herself to unwind, but Berlin doesn't need her, not like L.A. did. 

Kate picks up a postcard at the Ampelmann on Friedrichstrasse but she forgets to send it, and it gets buried at the bottom of her suitcase. 

\+ 

She has just checked into a hotel in Tokyo's Shibuya when she feels someone move up directly behind her at the counter. 

Kate turns her head slightly and catches a flash of red out of the corner of her eye. 

She nods imperceptibly. "Natasha."

"Hello, Kate."

Kate feels Natasha place a hand gently on her arm. "Walk with me, Kate." 

From the Black Widow, it's a command, not a request. Kate hoists her duffle up onto her shoulder and takes her key from the counter. "Okay, just let me drop my stuff off first." 

Natasha accompanies her all the way up to her hotel room and watches quietly as Kate deposits her two suitcases and her bow on the bed. 

"It's a little creepy when you do that, has anyone ever mentioned that to you before." 

"It's been suggested," Natasha replies, and it sounds like she's laughing, a little.

"What's this about?" 

Natasha shrugs in a way that is meant to look half-hearted but Kate isn't sure she's buying it. "I've got a mission that could use a Hawkeye." 

"SHIELD or your own thing?" 

"The mission is my own. I'm meeting a contact who I've been trailing for some time now. He's an American businessman who does a lot of work over here in Japan. I've reason to suspect that he has a network for selling advanced weapons technology and I want to feel him out."

Kate raises an eyebrow. "And you want eyes up top?" 

"It would be preferable." 

It would seem legitimate enough if Kate didn't know that this is the sort of mission that Natasha Romanova could handle on her own with both hands tied behind her back. 

She's curious enough to want to see how this plays out, so Kate picks up her bow and slings her quiver onto her back. "Sounds like I'm the Hawkeye for the job, then." 

\+ 

Natasha meets with her contact at a cafe in Hiroo, directing the businessman to a table outside on the sidewalk, as Kate gets settled on a rooftop across the street, bow and quiver next to her at the ready. 

Something tells her that she's not going to need either. 

It's fun, though, watching the Black Widow work. Every hand gesture and eyebrow quirk is careful and deliberate. She can see the way the other woman thought this meeting through right down to what shoes would come across best and how loose her posture should be. There's an art to what Natasha does that gets underestimated, Kate realizes. This is why the other woman can stand shoulder to shoulder with gods and super-powered beings and match them every time. 

"I'm swooning over you a little," Kate mutters into her comm-link. 

Across the street, she sees Natasha fight a smile. 

The meeting is over soon after and Kate returns to her hotel room, trusting that Natasha will follow. 

"So, what is this really about?" Kate asks, once Natasha joins her. 

"I wanted eyes up top, in case the meeting went south." 

Kate rolls her eyes and crosses her arms in front of her chest. "Come on, Widow. I'm not an idiot." 

Natasha sits down on the couch and favors Kate with an assessing gaze. "No, you are far from an idiot, Kate Bishop. What I want to know is what you're doing here, so far from home." 

"I needed to get away for a while. I guess. I guess I just wanted to see what it was like to pack up and go and see where it took me." 

"So, what has it been like?" 

"Lonely," Kate admits, before plopping down on the other side of the couch next to Natasha. "But not. Not a bad lonely, you know?"

"Yes, I do know," Natasha says, and Kate gets the feeling that in this, Natasha probably well and truly does. 

"I'm ready to go home now," Kate says, and as she's saying it, she realizes that it hadn't been true until that very moment. 

Natasha nods, decisively, before standing up and making for the door. "Give me a call when you're back in New York, Kate. We should train together some time." 

Kate grins widely. "Careful, you're gonna make me swoon again." 

Natasha makes a face that Kate probably figures means something along the lines of _Hawkeyes, honestly_ , before letting herself out. 

"I'm ready to go home now," Kate repeats aloud to the empty room. 

It feels good. 

+

She picks up a postcard with a picture of Tokyo Tower on the back at the hotel gift shop and gives it to the front desk to mail on her way out. 

_Barton,_

_You'll probably see me before you see this card._

_I'm coming home._

_Love,  
Kate._

\+ 

Lucky greets her at the door and Kate drops all of her bags on the floor to kneel down and bury her face in his fur. 

"Hey, buddy, did you miss me?" 

Lucky huffs and licks the side of her face. "I'm gonna take that as a yes." 

"Woah, woah, Katie-Kate. Couldn't I get a warning or something?" 

"What, you didn't get my postcard?" Kate says, and it doesn't come out quite as cheeky as she intended. She raises her head up to look at Clint, and feels her stomach clench with nerves. 

"You mean the dozens of postcards from you that I didn't receive? Nah, guess not," Clint says, and he's going for light-hearted but she knows him too well and can hear the hurt underneath. 

"Hey, I texted sometimes," Kate says, a little defensive. 

"Do I get a hug too or is that just for the dog?" 

"Just for the dog," she quips, even as she's standing up and then he is in her space and his arms are wrapped around her and her face is smushed into his chest. She's breathing in that scent again, of aftershave and cleaning solution, and it's still so achingly familiar even after all this time. 

If there's one thing that she's learned from the past year or so, it's that home is not a person and it's not a place, but it's this feeling that's some combination of the two. 

Clint presses a kiss to the top of her head. "Hey, Hawkeye." 

Kate pulls back from the hug. "Hey, Hawkeye."

She looks up at Clint and considers, before thinking firmly to herself, _fuck it_. She leans up, her arms snaking around Clint's neck, and kisses him. It's a brief, soft kiss and his lips are too dry and her heart is beating too fast, but it's _good_. 

When she pulls away, his eyes are wide, like that was the last thing he expected to happen. 

"Katie, what the hell was that?" 

She shrugs. "Something to think about?"

Just as she's thinking that she has no idea where this going to go next, Clint is tucking a hair behind her ear and kissing her again, pressing her back up against the doorway and almost tripping over her bags in the process.

"You know me, Katie. Thinking's not really my strong suit," Clint says, grinning down at her. 

Kate laughs her way into the next kiss.


End file.
